Hello everyone,
My original question was:
What other software do IAs use for diagramming when Visio is not available?
I suppose Illustrator could work, but I wonder if it has the flexibility to
create large flow charts.
I received an overwhelming number of responses to my query. Many thanks to
all who took the time to help me out with this question!
Here are the responses I received, beginning with the most popular:
-- OmniGraffle -- tops the list with 12 recommendations:
"It is the most flexible, intuitive, and productive tool I've seen. Combined
with their OmniOutliner, you can write an outline then export it into
OmniGraffle, which will, basically, draw your outline. Great for process
description, too."
"[OmniGraffle] is very Visio like, but doesn't suffer from the complexity
that Visio now does (although I find it's interface panes get fairly jumbled
on my 1024x768 screen.)"
"OmniGraffle 2.0 is the first application to ship with built-in support for
the visual vocabulary. OmniGraffle is currently pre-installed on all Apple
Power Macs and PowerBooks. It can also be downloaded from the Omni site."
Check it out at: <http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/>
Btw, the downside to OmniGraffle is that you must have OS X to run it.
-- Inspiration -- was a close second, with 11 recommendations:
"Although it's no Visio (or Illustrator), you might want to check out
http://www.inspiration.com/home.cfm Although it's intended as a learning
tool for children, it is actually quite useful for creating diagrams.
Additionally it allows you to switch between a diagram and outline view,
which can be extremely helpful."
"I have used Inspiration with some success. It's market to the education
crowd, and it's not as deep or powerful as Visio, but on the other hand it
has some features that I really like. Another benefit is that it is
identical for both Mac and Win."
"We use Inspiration. It's actually designed for the educational market but
if you need it to create site maps and task flow maps, it's very useful, and
they have a Mac version."
Check it out at:
<http://www.inspiration.com/productinfo/Inspiration/index.cfm>
-- Illustrator -- came in third with 10 recommendations:
"In my opinion, Illustrator works very well for flow charts and site maps,
precisely because it's a more flexible drawing tool than something like
Visio. It's less drag and drop, but gives you the ability to do a lot more
than you can do in Visio. Jesse James Garrett has built a visual vocabulary
library for Illustrator (and many other common IA tools) and made it
available on his site, <http://www.jjg.net/ia/visvocab/>."
"I use illustrator...the flaws with using Illustrator are pretty obvious -
you have to do almost everything by hand, or by improvising templates/
processes yourself. It is also kind of a slow program to get really fluent
with, I think, at least compared to photoshop. Illustrator 10 does have a
very basic symbol library though, which takes some of the pain out of
copying icons and things like that. It's advantages are that you have much
greater control over exactly how things look...you can also move from IAing
into designing fairly fluidly if that is how you work."
"I have also hoped for a Mac version of Visio, but have had relative success
with Illustrator. Once I have created the elements, I simply repurpose them
for each document. When creating large structures, I try to use
tabloid-size paper (11X17) to encompass it all. When that doesn't work, I
end up using one model to illustrate the high level architecture, and blow
out details on subsequent pages."
-- Concept Draw -- deserves an honorable mention with 6 recommendations:
"I recommend concept draw (conceptdraw.com) as a replacement for visio. It
even allows you to import visio documents perfectly. the newest version
offers some better features than visio such as pdf export."
-- Virtual PC/Visio -- received 4 recommendations:
"If you are comforable with Visio I'd suggest you consider using Virtual PC
to run Visio on your Mac. I used earlier versions and found it very robust,
although it does require a lot of amount of memory (Minimum requirement to
run Windows 2000 Professional - 1.5 GB Disk space, 192 MB RAM)
It has the benefit that you don't have to get up to speed with a new
application."
-- Other recommendations --
3 recommendations:
Freehand
2 recommendations:
Canvas
Dreamweaver
GoLive
InDesign
1 recommendation for each:
Acrobat
Clarisworks
Excel
MacFlow
Norpath Elements Design Studio
PowerPoint
TopDown
Thanks again to all who responded!
Monica Jimenez
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